Culture Watch
In this issue:
Jo Freeman reviews the fascinating biography of Isabella Greenway: An Enterprising Woman who demonstrated what women could do in the decades between the two waves of feminism, when women were expected to stay home and out of politics.
And Consider This examines online exhibits for two pioneers, one a celebrated Nobel-winning scientist, Marie Curie, and the other a English woman pilot overshadowed by Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson. A new Sinatra Christmas CD could provide an answer to a last minute gift need or just your own easy listening
Isabella Greenway: An Enterprising Woman
by Kristie Miller,
University of Arizona Press, 2004;
307 pps.
by Jo Freeman
When Isabella Selmes Ferguson Greenway stepped into her new office in
October of 1933 after being elected Arizona's first female Member of
Congress, she commented that this was her first paying job. After her birth
on March 22, 1886 into an upper middle-class family, no one would have predicted a life in politics. Like most women of her class, she was
expected to make a good marriage to a man of means and to make his life as
comfortable and productive as possible, while raising his children and
seeing that they got a good start in life.
In fact Isabella would fulfill some of these conventional responsibilities
with three marriages and three children. But she would also serve three
years in Congress, become a stalwart of the Democratic Party, build
Arizona's foremost hostelry, and oversee the cattle ranch and copper mines
that she inherited from her first two husbands.
Nonetheless, her wealth and social standing could not protect her from a
life of tragedy. She saw many of the people she loved most become ill and
die before their time. While she began and ended her life wealthy, there
were times when she or her widowed mother (a hidden alcoholic suffering from
depression), could barely pay the bills.
Kristie Miller's fine, new biography shows how this enterprising woman
turned tragedy into opportunity, how she both worked within the confinement
of women's traditional roles as housewife and mother and also broke their
bounds. By looking at the entirety of one woman's life, Miller illuminates
the erratic and unpredictable paths that brought women into politics.
Isabella did not come from a political family or marry into one. She moved
to New Mexico with her older first husband because he was ill with
tuberculosis and the dry desert air was considered healthy. She nursed him
for 17 years until he died, while home schooling their two children. Her
second marriage, to a wealthy Arizona mine owner, only lasted a little over two years,
until a lethal surgery left her a widow for the second time, with one more
child, at age 40.
A Roosevelt association marked all of Isabella's life and opened political
doors. Her parents became friends of Theodore Roosevelt when both were
ranching in the Dakotas. This led to a close, lifelong friendship with TR's niece, Eleanor. When ER married her distant cousin, Franklin, Isabella was
one of her bridesmaids. Her first two husbands, Robert H.M. Ferguson and
John Greenway, had been rough riders with TR in the war with Spain.
After her second husband's death, Isabella moved to Tucson where she plunged
into politics and civic activism. Within two years she was the Democratic
National Committeewoman from Arizona, deeply involved in organizing women
for Al Smith's presidential campaign. Although Smith lost, in 1932 Isabella
led a delegation pledged to FDR to the Democratic Convention. After becoming
President, FDR appointed Arizona's sole Member of Congress to be his
director of the budget, and the Arizona party chairman asked Isabella to run
for the vacancy thus created. She handily won election against two
opponents, and re-election two years later. But Isabella didn't like all
the demands that being in Congress made on her time, and declined to run
again in 1936.
Isabella returned to private life, taking care of various ill and dying
family members while tending to her business concerns. After marrying for
the third time a few years later she moved to New York City to live with her
new husband. By 1940 she was back in politics, but as a supporter of FDR's
opponent, Wendell Wilkie. She thought a third term was a misuse of power;
objected to FDR's support of the Allies in the European war, and her new
husband was a Republican. Until her death in 1953, her life was quieter,
but she always retained a strong interest in public affairs, especially
those of Arizona.
This fascinating portrait of an enterprising woman shows what women could do
in the decades between the two waves of feminism, when women were expected
to stay home and out of politics. If you want to know how women struggled to balance the demands of home and work, family and public affairs, and whether
or when break the rules, you should read this book.
And Consider This: Pioneers and A Sinatra Christmas Collection
